Pushed by an AT&T lobbyist, some revised amendments to the Telecoms Package could usher in filtering, and have rocketed net neutrality from a non-issue to one of the hottest under discussion in the Telecoms Package trialogues.

A raft of new “compromise” amendments to the Telecoms Package is circulating in Brussels. On the surface, they state that telcos, network operators and ISPs should be able to “address unjustified degradation of service”, and impose “reasonable usage restrictions, and price differentiation” without any regulatory interference. The sub-agenda however, is that these legal texts could enable network operators to shrug off accountability for filtering, throttling and degrading user traffic, including access to content. With obvious implications for the neutrality of the network.

Sen. Rockefeller believes NSA may have spied on him; Ex-NSA analyst believes program a remnant of 'Total Information Awareness'

Former National Security Agency analyst Russell Tice, who helped expose the NSA's warrantless wiretapping in December 2005, has now come forward with even more startling allegations. Tice told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann on Wednesday that the programs that spied on Americans were not only much broader than previously acknowledged but specifically targeted journalists.

"The National Security Agency had access to all Americans' communications -- faxes, phone calls, and their computer communications," Tice claimed. "It didn't matter whether you were in Kansas, in the middle of the country, and you never made foreign communications at all. They monitored all communications."

According to the 146 page report (available for download, but in Dutch) filesharing is good for the prosperity of the Dutch: with filesharing more media are available, even though this costs the media industry some profit. One of the most noticeable conclusions is that downloading and buying are not mutually exclusive: downloaders on average buy just as much music as non-downloaders, but they buy more DVDs and games then people who don't download. They also tend to visit more concerts and buy more merchandise."

Tax haven the Isle of Man, with a population of around 80,000, wants to introduce a compulsory blanket licence for music downloads. Broadband ISP subscribers would pay a "nominal" compulsory tax, but be able to share music legally.

Surprisingly, the proposal has won approval from the chief executive of the BPI, Geoff Taylor.

"At the end of the day, we are not going to stop piracy, so let's embrace it," the Manx government's inward investment minister Ron Berry told the MidemNet conference this weekend.

The idea of legalising P2P rather than stopping it is an ancient one: it's been used to create for new technologies for over a hundred years. Where it's too complicated and/or expensive to count or police individual exchanges, a blanket licence has been issued. It's five years since Jim Griffin explained the merits of these here.

It's ironic that the Isle of Man is proposing a compulsory tax. The island has no capital gains tax, corporation tax and income tax is ten per cent. Industry sectors deemed to be of strategic importance - including movies and fishing - are zero rated.

ISPs have hoped that 70 percent of file-swappers would pull down the Jolly Roger after they receive a mere notice. New research suggests that only 41 percent will stop; the rest require tough sanctions, and even disconnection won't stop many.

But most Internet users aren't sharing music at all; even the IFPI's own numbers show that only 18 percent of Europeans engage in any file-swapping. So the real question is not how all Internet users will react, but how the file-swappers will react.

La Quadrature du Net (Squaring the Net) is a citizen group informing about legislative projects menacing civil liberties as well as economic and social development in the digital age. Supported by international NGOs (EFF, OSI, ORG, Internautas, Netzwerk Freies Wissen, April, etc.), it aims at providing infrastructure for pan-European activism about such topics as network neutrality, privacy, "graduated response", etc.

From May to September 24th 2007, a campaign was setup to raise elected representatives', journalists' and public's awareness into the legislative hijack, by the content industries, of the European network regulation law ("Telecoms Package"). A strong mobilization around serious bits of analysis, and proper community tools helped to really influence things. [...]

Thus, using our local expertise on the topic (Olivennes bill about graduated response ordered by N. Sarkozy) could be exported at European level, especially when the "Telecoms Package" was at the very same moment being hijacked to include IP provisions, to legalize a pan-European graduated response, and to directly harm net neutrality.

La Quadrature du Net was built with the aim of bridging gaps between concerned NGOs across different European countries, providing analysis, pointers, tools and methods allowing everyone to participate on those key issues.

Many good solutions were brought into the text, cleaning the most disturbing parts of it (yet leaving some problematic bits), by constructing dialogues with concerned members of European Parliament (MEPs), producing legal and political analysis, and helping European citizens to participate.

Following complaints that its child-porn blacklist has led multiple British ISPs to censor innocuous content on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, the Internet Watch Foundation has confirmed the blacklist contains images housed by the 85-billion-page web history database.

But this fails to explain why Demon Internet and other ISPs are preventing some users from accessing the entire archive.

According to IWF guidelines, blacklisted URLs "are precise web pages" chosen so that "the risk of over blocking or collateral damage is minimised." But multiple Demon Internet customers say they're unable to view any sites stored by the Wayback Machine. And in response to our original story on this blacklist snafu, customers of additional ISPs - including Be Unlimited and Virgin - say they're experiencing much the same thing.

In a roundabout way, this led to Wikipedia banning large swathes of the UK from editing the "free encyclopedia anyone can edit." But just days later, the IWF agreed to lift the Wikiban, though it continued to say the Virgin Killer image is "potentially in breach" of the UK Protection of Children Act.